Modern-Day Debtor’s Prison

Tags

criminal justice, debt, Missouri, poverty, prison, taxes

Tony Messenger has been running a mesmerizing series of columns in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the criminal justice system in rural Missouri. The latest column appeared on Friday, and they are all worth careful reading.

The columns document how counties and judicial circuits around the state have turned their criminal justice systems into revenue-generating operations. A number of mechanisms have arisen to do this: Imposing high and ever-escalating court costs for probationers, requiring costly drug tests run by a private company, and incredibly enough, charging prisoners rent for the time they spend in jail.

The cumulative effect of all these tactics is that poor people — who are, of course, disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system — are serving as a new revenue stream for cash-strapped counties across the state. A dumb kid who messes up and runs afoul of the law gets pulled into “the system,” as it is so rightly called, and instead of simply serving his 30 days or whatever and putting the offense behind him, becomes a never-ending source of income for his county.

 

One can’t entirely blame the counties for this situation. Their tax bases are uncertain, especially in areas of the state with declining population (and thus sales taxes). They can’t keep raising property taxes, and in many cases have been finagled into giving property tax abatements to some of their biggest propertyholders by the promise of jobs in the future. (Boone County, where I live, has done that several times over the past few years, abating property taxes for companies that promise to locate in the county and bring new jobs.) So they look anywhere they can to make up the shortfall. Unfortunately, private companies that promise a fee for “services” like probation monitoring, drug testing, jail phone management, and the like offer a temptation that counties find hard to resist. And the disenfranchised end up bearing the cost. The subject of the most recent Messenger article is now homeless on the streets of Kansas City, not because he failed to complete his jail sentence, but because he couldn’t keep up with the mounting court costs that accumulated as a result.

We like to imagine debtor’s prisons as a long-ago horror from a novel by Dickens. Unfortunately, we seem to have re-created them in a new, corporatized, form. Any time you mix the workings of the criminal justice system and the profit motive, you are asking for abuse.

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A Fascinating Resource

Tags

archaeology, Curtis Copeland, history, maps, Milton Rafferty, Ozarks, Ozarks Symposium, Schoolcraft

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s trip through the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks, which resulted in the earliest systematic recorded documentation of the people and places of the region. Schoolcraft’s journal has been used by historians and scholars to understand the early landscape and culture of the Ozarks, although his attitude toward the inhabitants was condescending and his understanding of nature was limited.

The exact route of Schoolcraft’s travels has also been a subject of interest. Milton Rafferty, the dean of Ozarks geographers, devoted years to the subject, and his efforts culminated in a map published in Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks, the reprint of Schoolcraft’s journal he annotated and edited.

Now, thanks to the amazing work of Curtis Copeland, the GIS/Mapping Coordinator for the city of Branson, Rafferty’s map has been refined and improved. Using a complicated layering of digital information, Copeland has produced a scalable, multiple-level interactive map of Schoolcraft’s route. He previewed this map at the recent meeting of the Missouri Archaeological Society that occurred this weekend, and as an attendee of the concurrent Ozarks Studies Conference I got to see it in action. It’s a wonderful piece of work!

The map is free and available to the public at this site. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find it endlessly fascinating. With the enthusiastic reception his presentation received at the conference, I have no doubt that this resource will continue to be refined and added to as the years go by. Take a look . . . but be prepared to lose a few hours.

The Film Version

Tags

authenticity, Facebook, Missouri, movies, Scott Miller, television

I recently re-posted an article from The Daily Beast on my Facebook page, and it ended up generating a lot of discussion. Essentially, the article is the latest in a series of pieces by authors with Missouri ties, lamenting the portrayal of the state in movies and TV. I’ve contributed my own bit to this discussion, and in my Facebook post I was likewise sympathetic to the author’s complaint.

But my friend Scott Miller, himself a St. Louis-based author with a series of novels set in that city, took a different view. He commented on my post that Missouri as a setting, like all settings, gets exaggerated and simplified for effect, and we should (basically) quit whining about that. He’s got a point: Works of fiction are, after all, works of fiction, and most people get that. We don’t expect to encounter a thousand-year-old vampire when we visit New Orleans or louche murderers when we visit Miami, even though prominent fictional works might suggest such. Still, I can’t avoid wondering what kind of image is being presented of my home state and whether the accumulation of rednecks and meth-heads has an eventual impact.

Still, it would help if my fellow Missourians would quit living into that stereotype, especially those in the limelight. I rant occasionally about our legislature, which seems determined to out-idiot the other idiotic legislatures around the country from time to time, passing laws that allow people to carry guns basically anywhere they please without a minute’s training and protecting us from mythical United Nations interference. I suspect that such actions in the news contribute as much or more to people’s perceptions as the occasional movie or TV show, which tend to be set in fictional towns like Ebbing or Wind Gap and are typically not even filmed in the state.

But here’s an interesting thought experiment: If you could wave your hand and create a movie or TV show set in Missouri, one that conveyed an authentic sense of the state, what would it involve? I have a few ideas. I’d love to see a show that engages with present-day St. Louis – the way that King of the Hill and White Palace did for the time periods they dealt with. There’s such drama in the present condition of the city. And I think of all the Missourians who would make interesting biopics, like Scott Joplin, Walt Disney, or Kate Chopin. But to get the “authentic” Missouri, I think you’d have to mix city and country, past and present. The contradictions of the state can’t be captured in a simple story.

What do you imagine the ideal “Missouri” show to be?

Branson

Tags

Branson, duck boats, economics, mourning, tourism

Say “Ozarks” to someone from another part of the country, and a likely response will be. “Oh, sure, I’ve heard of it. Branson.”

Whether you love it or hate it, Branson is the face of the Ozarks to much of the rest of the world, and it has been so pretty much ever since The Shepherd of the Hills.

Branson is mourning right now, after the appalling tragedy on Table Rock Lake in which seventeen people died. The investigation into the cause of the sinking is just beginning, but the inevitable procession of recriminations, lawsuits, settlements, and pain stretches clearly before us.

Branson’s mourning is for the drowning victims, of course, but it is also mourning for itself; an accident like this breaks the veneer of Branson. The religiosity, the patriotism, the ensemble entertainment, all combine to assure tourists that Branson is, above all things, safe. Nothing upsetting or untoward will ever happen to you in Branson. And now this has happened. Nervous statements by residents in news stories combine grief toward the victims with apprehension about the incident’s effect on future bookings.

The Branson economic ecosystem has always been fragile, as illustrated by this recent NPR story about the troubles of those who perform the many necessary services required by this tourist town, the hotel housekeepers, lawn maintenance workers, restaurant servers, and such. A town that depends on large numbers of visitors from distant cities, who come in search of a bucolic myth, is always one incident away from a crippling blow. Let’s just hope that Branson finds its feet again before this accident brings a disastrous ripple effect of shutdowns and layoffs onto those least able to weather them.

Films!

Tags

film, National Scenic Riverways, Ozarks, rivers, St. Louis, Tivoli Theatre, travel

The Tivoli Theatre in St. Louis recently hosted an Ozark Streams Film Festival! I was unable to attend, but was impressed by the list of films.

Luckily for us non-attendees, the festival organizers have posted links to all the films on their website. I plan to watch all of them, one by one, whenever I feel the need for some Scenic Rivers relaxation but can’t get away for a float trip.

 

Another Remarkable Bit of History I Just Learned

Tags

African Americans, Bootheel, Charleston, farming, Great Depression, Highway 60, Highway 61, sharecroppers, tenant farming, unions

I like to think of myself as a curious guy. I even take pride in it, and in feeling that I actually know a few things. Thus when I discover an episode of history right in my backyard that I didn’t know the least bit about, I am humbled at how much I don’t know, and how much is yet to be learned.

That’s what happened to me when, entirely by accident, I stumbled across this article in a journal called Southern Spaces. Even more humbling to me as a Missouri history aficionado, it was written by someone from the University of Sussex. You should really read the whole article; it’s long but fascinating. But here’s a short summary.

The Great Depression hit everyone hard, but one group hit hardest was the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the South. Falling prices, increased mechanization, government policies, and environmental disasters all combined to make these most marginal citizens even more marginal than ever. In southeast Missouri, this tenuous existence had been worsened in a January 1937 flood when the Army Corps of Engineers dynamited the levee on the Mississippi River to relieve pressure on Cairo, Illinois, across the river; they gave the 12,000 tenants and sharecroppers on the Missouri side three days to pack their belongings and get out.

Russell Lee, Negro flood refugees at meal time, Charleston, Missouri, February 1937. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF34- 010215-D.

These refugees, moved by the federal Resettlement Administration to camps in and around Charleston, were fed and housed by the government, but only a few received permanent resettlement. A cooperative farm known as LaForge Farms was created, but only 100 homes were built, with 60 of those homes reserved for white people (the tenant farmers and sharecroppers were overwhelmingly African-American). In response, many of the displaced farmers joined the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which had been established in northeast Arkansas a few years earlier.

Now jump ahead two years, to January 1939. The forces at work in the lives of the tenant farmers were still at work, most notably the federal government’s attempt to prop up commodity prices by paying landowners to take acreage out of production – which meant that those landowners had even less need for tenants or sharecroppers. So when the turn of the new year came, the traditional time for the renewal of agreements between landowners and their tenants, many of those folks received eviction notices instead.

In the past, a farmer receiving an eviction notice would have mourned, regretted the news, maybe tried to convince the landowner to let him stay another year, and eventually moved on in search of a new tenancy. But these farmers, pressed to the extreme by circumstances and awakened by their organizing, chose a different path.

They demonstrated.

Arthur Rothstein, Evicted sharecroppers along Highway 60, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002926-M3.

The farmers, the union, and other groups like the NAACP and the St. Louis chapter of the Urban League, knowing that large-scale evictions were probably coming, had alerted the news media, and on January 10, some 1,500 people (including about 200 white tenant farmers and sharecroppers) gathered their belongings and created roadside encampments alongside Highway 61 and Highway 60, the two great artery highways of Southeast Missouri. As Jarod Roll, the author of the Southern Spaces article, puts it, “In over a dozen camps, large and small, they erected makeshift tents by draping blankets and sheets over stick frames. Into these tents they moved whatever clothing, food and belongings they had brought. They unloaded straw ticks and corn shuck mattresses from old cars and trucks, parking the vehicles close to their camps to provide shelter for children and the elderly. With this work finished, they sat down among kin, friends and neighbors to wait for the nation to wake up and respond to their collective statement of discontent.”

And respond it did. The Associated Press, major area newspapers, and the Farm Security Administration (the new name for the Resettlement Administration) all sent photographers. It is our good fortune that the FSA photographer who happened to be in the area, and who was sent to document the demonstration, was the great Arthur Rothstein, creator of the iconic “Dust Bowl” photograph of a farmer and his two sons. Thus we have these unforgettable images of the Bootheel roadside encampments – and their subsequent dismantling.

Arthur Rothstein, State highway officials moving sharecroppers away from roadside to area between the levee and the Mississippi River, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002975-M2.

The initial outcry over the photographs and news stories reached all the way to the White House, with both Roosevelts responding to the farmers’ plight. Federal officials hurried to the Bootheel to talk to the farmers and their representatives.

But state and local officials, stung by the bad publicity, had other ideas. The local papers portrayed the farmers as the unwitting tools of social agitators, and the state health commissioners declared the camps to be a menace to public health because they lacked clean water and sanitary toilets. (Did the typical sharecropper’s cabin have clean water and sanitary toilets? You guess.) So the state highway patrol and local law enforcement officers were instructed to remove the demonstrators from the roadside.

Arthur Rothstein, State highway officials moving evicted sharecroppers away from roadside to area between the levee and the Mississippi River, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002932-M2.

By a sad coincidence, many of the evicted farmers were relocated to camps on the same ground that had been flooded by the Corps of Engineers two years earlier. The primary advantage of this location, from the authorities’ viewpoint, was that it was many miles off the highway and thus out of sight, and could be guarded by local officers to keep the press away. The state health commissioner actually referred to these sites as “concentration camps.” And when word arrived that President Roosevelt had authorized the sending of tents, food, and most alarmingly cash grants and relocation loans to the farmers, the local authorities moved again, breaking up the farmers into even smaller groups and dumping some of them on back roads.

Finally, in 1940 and 1941, the FSA built more than 600 homes for the displaced farmers at sites scattered around the Bootheel, although again with a racial disparity of two homes for white families for every one home for an African-American one. It even tried out an experiment in providing low-cost medical care to the poor families, and more than 1,200 families signed up for the plan. But continued opposition from local politicians, who saw the FSA settlements as hotbeds for union activism, led to the eventual privatization of the homes and subcontracting of the health service to Blue Cross. Fortunately, a last burst of activism and fund-raising allowed most of the residents to buy the homes that they had been renting from the FSA.

Rothstein, Arthur, Evicted sharecropper and child, New Madrid County, Missouri, January 1939. FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 002945-M2

It’s a remarkable story of struggle, collective action, and the disenfranchisement of the poor that echoes to us today. And doggone, why had I not heard it until now? I’m chagrined at the many things I haven’t learned.

(P.S. There’s a nice article about the LaForge homes here.)

 

 

Our Original Sin

Tags

Henry Caldwell, history, Iron County, Ironton, J. W. Emerson, John Abney, Larry Wood, lynching, Missouri, Ozarks, slavery, William Hinchey

The circumstances of the original incident between Henry Caldwell and a Mrs. Peck on July 27, 1882, are unclear. An account of the incident can be found on Larry Wood’s admirable Ozarks history blog. Mrs. Peck, according to the original newspaper report, was more than sixty years old and Caldwell was thirty-seven; but we’re left to guess who Mrs. Peck might be, since her first name is not given in the Iron County Register story. But since the incident took place in Ironton, my guess would be Adaline Peck, who would have been 64 that year according to census records.

In any event, according to the Register story, on that Thursday morning cries for help were heard. Neighbors rushed to the scene and found Mrs. Peck and Henry Caldwell in the front yard of her home, struggling. Henry was subdued, taken to the jail, and charged with assault and attempted rape.

The next chapter in this grim story is dispiritingly familiar. Thursday night passed, Friday night passed, with Caldwell still in jail. Then late Saturday night, a mob of thirty to forty men assembled, broke into the jail, and dragged Caldwell to the railroad bridge over Stouts Creek a few blocks away, a noose around his neck. The other end of the rope was tied to a bridge beam and Caldwell was thrown off, but desperate to live, he clung to the bridge timbers until someone took a knife to his arm. When he fell, another gruesome miscalculation; his feet touched the ground. The mob ended his life with a fusillade of bullets.

In his book Witnesses to History: Stories from Park View Cemetery, which is available from the Iron County Historical Society, John M. Abney quotes a different version. The letter from which this quotation is taken is in the possession of the Historical Society.

Henry did something that frightened old lady Peck and it was construed by some as an intended attack on his part.  I [the letter writer, Cora Chase Charlton, daughter of the prosecuting attorney at the time] – who have heard her minute account of what really happened more than once, did not think so.  But a bunch of men who spent their time in the Schultz saloon inflamed themselves with liquor to the point of taking poor Henry out, hanging him on the railroad bridge, and riddling his body with bullits.

Thus occurred the only documented lynching in Iron County, Missouri.

I first became aware of this event many years ago, when I read the diary of a little boy growing up in Arcadia during that time. The boy’s name was Stephen Hinchey, and the diary entry (which I carefully copied down and filed away – this was in the days before computers) read as follows:

Sat July 29

I studied most of the day.

In evening father heard, while in Ironton, that a negro was to be hung by a mob when night came. Father and I went to home of Judge Emerson to warn him of the mob’s plan.

Sunday 30th of July

This morning we heard that the mob hanged the negro on the Ironton railroad bridge. About 60 shots were fired into his body.

A later entry reads:

Sat. August 12th 1882

Today is my 9th birthday.

A few thoughts:

Stephen Hinchey’s father was William Hinchey, an artist and teacher at Arcadia College, and a prodigious diarist himself. William Hinchey’s diaries, written in shorthand and transcribed by Stephen years later, described his travels to the West, his observations during the Civil War, and his life in Arcadia and elsewhere. The Arcadia Valley has drawn many fine artists over the years, and Hinchey was but the first.

William Hinchey

Henry Caldwell, thirty-seven at the time of his death, was identified in the Register article as married with four children. Census records from 1880 confirm that his wife was Millie, and their children Stella, Peter, Edia, and Nettie. A man who was that age in 1882 would most likely have been born into slavery and lived in that condition until his late teens, nearly twenty. The Register describes him as a bit daft “and at times out-and-out crazy.” Whether there was truth to this description, or a connection to having lived half his life as a slave, cannot be determined, as news accounts of lynchings are notorious for their retrospective portrayals of victims as dangerous and mobs as honor-bound. But Cora Chase Carlton also believed something to be aberrant about Caldwell. The editor of the Register, Eli Ake, went so far to say in his article, “We are not an advocate of lynch-law, but if there ever can be a case calling justly for its intervention, this was one.” The entire account can be found in the Library of Congress’ records. I have been unable to learn what became of Mrs. Caldwell and the children.

The “Judge Emerson” to whom Stephen refers was another significant character in the history of that era: J. W. Emerson, Civil War colonel, war hero, circuit judge, and founding investor in the Emerson Electric Company, a name we still see on consumer products although the ownership of the company has long since passed into the stock exchange.

J. W. Emerson

This lynching predates the horrific spate of lynchings across the Ozarks chronicled in Kimberly Harper’s book White Man’s Heaven by about twenty years. But the pattern is certainly familiar. I am left with a few unanswered questions. The newspaper account depicts the county sheriff, William Fletcher, as surprised and overwhelmed by the mob; but was he? According to the article he had made preparations for mob law the two previous nights, but was caught unprepared on the fatal night. How likely is that? The “colored servant” who usually slept in the jail overnight was conveniently absent. If he sensed something amiss, how did the sheriff not? As Harper’s book observes, a common tactic for law enforcement officials seeking to prevent a lynching was to move the prisoner to the next town or county, making it more difficult for a mob to form and disperse inconspicuously. Why that didn’t happen in this case is impossible to know at this late date.

It’s worth remembering, moreover, that Iron County was firmly Democratic by then, and as Aaron Astor points out in Rebels on the Border, one of the tenets of border-state Democrats of that era was the restoration of the prewar social order, which would include the firm subjugation of African-Americans. The racist language of the Register article and the perception of Caldwell as “dangerous” and “a brute” fit into this mindset. (It’s also worth remembering that Eli Ake, the editor, was a complicated figure who doesn’t pigeonhole easily; John Abney reminded me in correspondence that Ake opened the pages of the Register to African-American correspondents for many years and repeatedly took some risky stands against the Ku Klux Klan in the ’20s and ’30s.)

On a TV show the other night, I heard a historian refer to slavery as “our original sin,” with our meaning “white Americans,” of course. Americans tend not to believe in original sin, a stark doctrine that robs us of individual agency and casts us as largely helpless in deciding our own fate. I’m not a believer in it either, at least not in the religious sense, but it’s surely a powerful metaphor for the unseen forces that shape our lives and our thoughts. To avoid the theological implications, I think of it as “stain” more than “sin.” Some stains simply don’t wash out, no matter how much we scrub.

Caldwell was buried in Park View Cemetery in Ironton, a cemetery also known variously as “potters’ field,” “City Cemetery,” or “the colored cemetery.” It is obscure enough today that it doesn’t even appear on Google Maps. Of the estimated 300 graves in that cemetery, only about thirty have markers. Stephen Hinchey, William Fletcher, J. W. Emerson, and Eli Ake are all buried in Ironton’s Masonic Cemetery. May they all rest in peace, and may we all eventually find some way to fully include that stain in our understanding of the social fabric of our lives. Because more than 130 years have passed and it still hasn’t washed out.

Park View Cemetery

Favorite Ozarks Books – 10

Tags

anthologies, books, Don West, Donald Harington, Eugene Doty, Harry Minetree, Jack Butler, Jean Bell Mosely, Jim Bogan, Jim Hamilton, Langston Hughes, Leonard Hall, Miller Williams, Ozark Ozark, Paul Johnson, Roy Reed, Speer Morgan, Thomza Zimmerman, University of Missouri, Vance Randolph, Walter Bargen, Ward Dorrance

I’ve been thinking about Ozark anthologies lately, and have been re-reading a couple. Ozark, Ozark, edited by Miller Williams, came out in 1981. I have a vague recollection of being an intern at the University of Missouri Press when this book was in production, but I don’t believe I worked on any of it, except perhaps for helping to proofread the Acknowledgements page or something equally forgettable. That’s too bad, because I would like to be able to claim some small amount of credit for this very memorable anthology.

Williams employed a sort-of chronological approach in this anthology, organizing by author birthdate starting in 1869 and ending in 1949. Like all structures, this approach both confines and provides framing; there’s no Schoolcraft or Turnbo, but the early- to mid-part of the century is well represented. Vance Randolph is in there, along with Ward Dorrance and Donald Harington. But I’m more taken by the less-familiar names in the collection, authors I hadn’t known before: Don West, Jack Butler. Some people I’ve known personally are welcome inhJabitants of these pages: Speer Morgan, Eugene Warren (who writes as Eugene Doty nowadays), Jim Bogan, Paul Johnson, Walter Bargen. An occasional ringer fills out the pages as well, like Langston Hughes, who yes was born in Joplin, making him an Ozarker by birth, but who high-tailed it for Mexico, Europe, and New York as quick as he got the chance.

I particularly like the inclusion of some accomplished newspaper columnists in the anthology. The newspaper column is a demanding craft, with strict word counts and unforgiving deadlines, and it’s easy to become a hack at it. Even the best columnists occasionally write a bad one, but the good ones somehow manage to find grace or insight in the everyday rhythms of life. The Jean Bell Mosely/Thomza Zimmerman alternating column, “From Dawn to Dusk,” which appeared in Cape Girardeau newspapers and was syndicated regionally for 21 years, was such a column. So too were the columns of Jim Hamilton, the longtime editor of the Buffalo Reflex, who later collected some of his best ones in a book entitled River of Used to Be, which is one of the prizes on my shelf. We don’t have selections from either of those in this anthology, but we do have columns from Leonard Hall and Roy Reed, and a short magazine piece from Harry Minetree.

The anthology is a reflection of its time, overwhelmingly male and white, and that’s a weakness. I also spotted a few errors in the introduction and notes, but despite those difficulties, Ozark Ozark: A Hillside Reader is still a pleasure to dip into. It’s out of print, as far as I can tell, but used copies can be found for not too outrageous a price.

 

 

 

 

Microclimates

Tags

climate, land, Missouri, mushrooms, native plants, Ozarks, Wildflowers

My Facebook feed from Love My Ozarks is filled with mushrooms these days, proud finds from morel hunters who, of course, never quite reveal their secret spot.

I was never much of a mushroom hunter, not from a lack of desire, but from a lack of ability to find the darn things. Then my great friend Rod Walton took me mushroom hunting one spring, and I came back with a sackful. My vision didn’t miraculously improve; what I learned was how to see and where to look.

When we see a map of Missouri’s ecosystems, even a relatively sophisticated one such as this one from the EPA, we know intuitively that it’s just an approximation.

In reality, our landforms are much more varied. A while back, I visited Finger Lakes State Park just a couple of miles north of my house, and just in the short distance of the Kelley Branch Trail a hiker will pass through a buckeye grove, a birch grove, and a pine grove, in addition to the usual oak-hickory forest. Diversity, not uniformity, is the norm in an Ozarks forest. That was my problem hunting mushrooms; I didn’t know the right micro-environment to be looking in.

Subtle shifts in sunlight, soil type, slope, adjacent vegetation, moisture, and other factors produce a forest that is different from the forest only a few yards away. Ozarks landscapes do not offer us the grand experience of the sublime, but rather the rewards of close examination, the appreciation of small things.

Anemone and trillium here, wild ginger there. orange puccoon over there. Microclimates and micro-environments, the joy of variation within small spaces.

Images of the Past

Tags

detail, history, interpretation, photography, St. Louis

Researching my next book, I came across this trove of photographs in the online magazine Monovisions. 

There’s something about the visual image that arrests in a way that verbal descriptions never do. I lose myself in a narrative or descriptive account, letting my imagination recreate the scene; but with a photograph or map I find myself studying ever more closely, seeking out meaning in the slightest detail.

This photograph was identified as “ca. 1900” and located on Market Street. Let’s assume that the street address on the photo – 1310 – follows the same numbering system in use today. Here’s what’s there now:

A pocket park next to City Hall.

I’m tempted by the story, how the city went from Image A to Image B, but I’m also irresistibly drawn to the image itself. The life in that photograph! The man peering out from the dark interior on the left – is he the proprietor? And what draws his attention? The blurred passerby near him, or the two loafers propped again the liquor window farther down? I can’t make out the posters in that window, but they appear to be promoting a circus that’s coming to town. Below that, California wines are advertised. California wine, in Missouri, at that time? I never imagined.

The enormous billboard on the roof is another infinite attraction. The Forest Park Highlands will be opening for the season soon! There’s a matinee at the Imperial! And who can resist Tomlinson’s Dead Shot and Quick Relief Oil? I’d buy a bottle just for the name.

And these pavers, identified as working on Compton Avenue north of Meramec in 1906, spiffy in their neckties. Why so many paving stones out? I’m guessing it had something to do with getting a good fit of the stones, with pride in one’s craft. Judging by the spires of St. Anthony of Padua in the background, this looks to be the block today:

Those stone paving blocks are still underneath the asphalt, I’ll bet. That would be Gasconade Street crossing, which puts the location way south in St. Louis, down in Dutchtown. A solid and respectable address even then, with gaslamps, limestone foundations, and a big brick neighborhood church. You can see in the background how the paved street will improve the place, as the rutted dirt track leads up the hill to St. Anthony’s.

Finally (for my purposes, anyway: there are more photos in the article), an unidentified street in the early twentieth century. It’s just the beginning of the motorized era; a sleuth more expert in early automobiles could probably identify the year by the look of the light cargo carrier in the right foreground. But carriages still dominate. Ahead of the man in the motorcar is another man in a one-horse gig, following a wagon that appears to be laden with sacks of grain as it labors up the muddy, tracked hill. But most fascinating of all is the heavy wagon coming in from a side street to the left, with an enormous wooden barrel. Delivering? Taking away? Whatever the task, I wouldn’t want to be that horse.

The marvel about old photographs is how the edges, the details, reveal as much or more than the putative subject. The cock of a hat, the item in a window, the passing glance, all speak to us.